When one sees a movie after it has cleaned up at the Academy Awards,
one obviously has certain expectations. I had heard nothing but the
highest of praise for Clint Eastwood's twenty-fifth film as a director,
the female boxing drama based on a Paul Haggis screenplay of an F.X.
Toole story called “Rope Burns.” “Million Dollar Baby” is a beautifully
simple story of a girl who comes of age a little later in life than
most and a hardened man who has been struggling with the emotional loss
(not the death of) his own daughter. I went in expecting a knock-down,
drag-out boxing movie in the vein of “Rocky,” but was surprised to find
that, although everything in this movie is about boxing, the boxing
itself plays second fiddle to the real heart of the story.

Academy Award winner Hilary Swank plays Maggie, a small-town girl from
rural and very poor Mississippi who comes out to the big city of Los
Angeles, not to become a movie star, but rather to follow a different
dream. In her early thirties with a dead-end job as a waitress at a
small diner, Maggie has decided she wants to be a boxer. She seeks out
former trainer turned gym owner Frankie Dunn, played by director
Eastwood. The first struggle for Maggie is to convince this hardened
boxing world veteran that she is a worthy candidate for training. “I
Don’t Train Girls!” says a crotchety old Dunn, but Maggie takes it upon
herself to show up at the gym in every spare moment of her day and work
the punching bag .Her flat-footed, no-technique punching drives Dunn so
crazy he cant stand to look at it. After some helpful hints from one of
the other gym-goers, Maggie begins to show some promise and even Dunn
starts to see it.

Dunn takes Maggie on an emotional ride up the ranks of female boxing,
starting in the lowest level fights you can imagine, set in what looks
like it might be a community rec center with a few folding chairs and a
handful of local yokels. There are a few unbelievable scenarios that
you have to sort of “go with” and just accept, such as Maggie’s
unbelievably fast rise to fame where she goes quickly from hardly being
able to punch the punching bag, to knocking women out in the first
moments of her fights, often with one-punch. As I was watching her
really start to take form and mow through opponents, it seemed as if
Eastwood, as director, rushed her progression as a fighter just a
little too much. I now know after seeing the film that the boxing was
just a vehicle to get to the emotional heart of the film, but as a
boxing fan, I would have liked to have seen a little more drama and a
slower build on her way to the top of the female boxing world. She got
way too good, way too fast, but in the end, that is all beside the
point.

Morgan Freeman is perfectly cast as the former fighter turned gym
jack-of-all-trades Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris. His soulful narration
that guides us through the film lends such an air of credibility to the
film that it made it easier for the Academy Award voting body to foist
such high accolades on the film. Just hearing his voice makes you feel
like you are watching a special movie.

The look of “Million Dollar Baby” is gritty and dark at times, with
many of the scenes set in the training gym of Frankie Dunn. White and
gray walls make up the space and there are no flashy colors to be seen
anywhere. The brightest colors on screen are the subtle reds of a pair
of boxing gloves or a speed punching bag. The camera work gives the
film a semi-retro feeling that is a little bit “Rocky” with some black
and white “Raging Bull” thrown in. The DVD transfer is very clean.
However, if you have a big screen TV that doesn’t have excellent black
levels, there are going to be some scenes where you will struggle to
see the actors with much detail. Dunn comes home to his dimly lit
house, only to find the letters that he has been writing to his
daughter returned every time under his doorstep. As he puts them away,
perfectly filed in shoeboxes in his bedroom closet, you will see how
dark this film really is. It is partly done for emotional impact, but
just note that you will benefit greatly from a modern TV that has
improved black levels over first and second generation plasmas and DLP
TVs.

The sound of the film is above average, with very well-done foley work
during the boxing scenes. Just for kicks, I went back and watched some
of the fight scenes in “Rocky” and what I realized is that the “Rocky”
series seemingly has one or two different punch sounds, which are
basically repeated for every single punch, whether it’s a glancing blow
or an uppercut straight to the jaw. In “Million Dollar Baby,” the sound
design is so much more evolved and well-done that you aren’t distracted
by phony sounding over the top punching sound effects. The sound of
Dunn snapping Maggie’s broken nose back into place is bone-chilling and
the surround sound mix as the fighters move around the ring is
tastefully done.

What surprised me about “Million Dollar Baby” the most was that,
although it is set in the world of boxing, it’s really not a boxing
movie. The real fight rages inside the hearts and minds of Maggie and
Frankie as they are forced to deal with one of the toughest decisions
that someone will ever have to make in life.

This double DVD release also features a disc with several featurettes,
including a roundtable interview session hosted by James Lipton. Clint
Eastwood, Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman humbly discuss the subtle
nuances of the film that have made it resonate with so many people and
the feeling of the interview is, not surprisingly, very similar to an
episode of the show “Inside the Actor’s Studio” that Lipton hosts. A
making-of documentary lets us see behind the scenes action in a piece
called “Producers Round 15” and we get to look into the real world of
competitive women’s boxing in “Born to Fight,” a documentary that
examines the parallels between “Million Dollar Baby” and the life of
boxer Lucia Rijker.

If you are looking for this to be the female version of “Rocky,” you
are barking up the wrong tree. “Million Dollar Baby” is a film that is
so small and tightly focused that it could be done on a stage with a
few sets and a lot of heart. Eastwood milks brilliantly subtle
performances out of every actor and this is why the film has resonated
so strongly with the public. The prior year the epic film “The Lord of
the Rings: The Return of the King” took home all of the statues at the
Academy Awards and this year, a little underdog by the name of “Million
Dollar Baby,” a film that couldn’t have been smaller in scale that that
Middle Earth masterpiece, took home the Best Picture award. This
two-disc set is something you should pick up to see how filmmaking can
be done incredibly well on a small scale as well.